Carphone: Pirates will always win

Calls for internet service providers to halt illegal file sharing are “naive”, according to Charles Dunstone, the boss of Carphone Warehouse. He said the solution is education about the benefits of respecting copyright coupled with services that allow consumers “to get content easily and cheaply”.

Dunstone said people had become “obsessed” by peer-to-peer file sharing but “there is a myriad of ways that you can share content on the Internetâ€¦ If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.”

Carphone, now one of the UK's biggest ISPs after the purchase of Tiscali, doesn't want any three-strikes or similar propositions in the up- coming Digital Britain report.